Tag: Stress Reduction

Being present …even with difficult emotions

Karl Duffy2 Comments

welcome-mat

In meditation …. meet what arises in the mind. First meet it and include it,  whether you like it or should be experiencing it or not. While stepping back, be curious, be more fully conscious. How is this anger, how does it feel? How am I with it? What’s it like when I don’t stiffen against it, lecture it? What’s it like when I don’t believe in the stories it tells me about them and me and how it should be, but distill all that down to one reference point: anger, simmering, burning? Can I see it as a trapped energy that needs some generous handling? Visualize it – what does it look like? Above all prioritize present engagement, feel it in your body, breathe into it. Abandon the idea of getting through it, or that you should be some other way. Then, when I’m not superior or inferior to my anger; when I am neither denying not justifying it – then I’m not overwhelmed and the anger is held with mindfulness. Deprived of further food, it reconnects to bodily vitality. So the mind becomes calm and bright.

Ajahn Sucitto, Spiritual work is Play

Reacting or responding?

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No matter what the situation is,
we are responsible for our own mind states

Joseph Goldstein

Push and pull

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File:Tug of war 2.jpg

Meditation practice provides the perfect context for observing our beliefs and recognizing the tug-of-war we have with our experience. Just sit quietly for five minutes and watch what happens. Unless we have some accomplishment in meditation, we won’t know what to do with all the activity. We become overwhelmed by the energetic play of the mind, pummeled by our own thoughts and emotions, bewildered by our inability to sit in peace. We will want to do something. And we really only have two means of escape from all this mayhem: we can either spin out into thought, which is an exaggeration of reality, or we can suppress or deny it.

Exaggeration and denial describe the dilemma we have with mind, and not just in meditation. Exaggeration and denial operate in conjunction with all our fantasies, hopes, and fears. When we exaggerate experience, we see what isn’t there. And when we deny it, we don’t see what is. Both exaggeration and denial are extraneous to the true nature of things, the nature we experience when we can just stay present.

Elizabeth Mattis-Namgyel, The Power of an Open Question

A pure space of bare attention

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File:2007-07-09Aquilegia01.jpgWe have never, not for a single day, the pure space before us, in which flowers
unendingly burst open.

It is always world and never nowhere without no:
that pureness, that unwatched, which one breathes and
endlessly knows and never wants

Rilke, Duino Elegies

Knowing the mental energies

Karl Duffy4 Comments

storm-sailingMany people fail to distinguish between their true nature and their personality traits, particularly their less desirable traits. The fact is you are not the worst characteristics of your personality. It is the nature of the untrained mind to want what it perceives as advantageous and to fear or hate what seems painful. Discovering how your heart and mind can work together to use these feelings allows you to move beyond them. You may feel overwhelmed by the circumstances of your present life or bound by past traumatic events. Again, this is a failure in perception. They are just mind-states which can be known. They can be seen as impermanent and not belonging to you and, therefore, they do not ultimately define your true nature.

Philip Moffitt

Opening to the invisible

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 keyboard_hands

This evening we celebrate Halloween which is based on the most important Ancient Irish and Celtic feast, that of Samhain. The Celtic year was divided into two parts, the bright half from the 1st of May until today,  and the dark half, starting tomorrow. Today stood in-between, when Summer not quite fully over, but the old year was dying and  winter was about to  begin. On this in-between day  it was felt that the normal barriers between the visible and invisible worlds were less strong. The normal Celtic sensitivity to the hidden world – their awareness that the other world was always there right beside them – was heightened, So for us too, it can be a day to be more aware of deeper dimensions, by not rushing past the “ordinary” or the routine, by not expecting real happiness to be elsewhere, but by tuning in to the “bits and pieces of everyday” as poet Paddy Kavanagh reminded us.

One comes to know the interior of the exterior. One comes to know the inside of every outside. It’s not only human beings that have an interior or an inside, but that the world around us as well can be known inwardly. Life is dense with those levels of experience, but we need to calm ourselves, get clear, get quiet, direct attention, sustain the attention, open up to what is normally invisible, and certain things begin to show themselves. Maybe gently to begin with, but nonetheless it deepens and enriches our lives. If we are committed to knowledge, then we ought to be committed also to exploring the world with these lenses, with this method in mind and heart.

Arthur Zajonc,  Professor of Physics,  Amherst College